The Iran war has done more than send oil prices spiking and shut down shipping through the Strait of Hormuz—it could reshape how many people go hungry through the rest of the decade to nearly 19 million more across Asia and Africa combined, according to a UN report released Tuesday.
The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026 report, published jointly by five UN agencies, modeled what happens to global hunger through 2030 under competing assumptions about how long the fallout from this year’s conflict in the Middle East lasts. In the most pessimistic scenario, in which strikes on oil and gas infrastructure in the Persian Gulf take years to repair, the report projects 522 million people will be undernourished in 2030 compared to the 503 million in a pre-conflict baseline.
That gap, 18.8 million additional people pushed into chronic hunger, is driven almost entirely by two regions: Asia, where the report projects 10 million more hungry people than it would have without the war, and Africa, with 8 million more, with Latin America and the Caribbean making up the difference.
That figure is narrower than what the World Food Programme, one of the agencies involved in the report, warned of earlier in the war. In a March analysis, WFP projected that up to 45 million more people could be pushed into acute food insecurity by mid-2026 if the conflict persisted and oil stayed above $100 a barrel. However, that number measures something different: an acute, near-term crisis rather than the longer-run undernourishment the new SOFI report tracks through 2030.
In all the scenarios taken together, the Hormuz-related crisis could leave between 8 million and 19 million additional people undernourished in 2030 compared with the trajectory expected before the conflict.
But 18 million as a worst-case scenario is a striking number under any circumstance. It’s more than four times low-end estimates of the death toll from the Holodomor, the Soviet-engineered famine that killed an estimated 3.5 million to 10 million Ukrainians in between 1932 and 1933, and more than ten times the roughly 1 million to 1.5 million people who died in Ireland’s potato famine. The comparison isn’t exact—SOFI counts people pushed into chronic hunger by 2030, not deaths—but it underscores the scale of a shock that rivals some of history’s greatest famines.
Máximo Torero Cullen, the chief economist of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, told UnHerd over email that the Hormuz-related crisis “erodes a significant part of the progress that would otherwise have occurred” in reducing global hunger.
The direct link from the Iran war and hunger is fertilizer, which is sourced from natural gas, and also fertilizer’s demand and supply dynamics, according to Peter Alexander, a senior lecturer in global food security at the University of Edinburgh who has studied how energy and fertilizer shocks ripple through food systems.
Alexander told UnHerd that because fertilizer trades on a global market, a supply shock anywhere raises prices everywhere, regardless of whether a given country ever bought a bag of fertilizer or gas from the Gulf. Farmers then act on that price signal—using less fertilizer, switching to less input-intensive crops, or not planting certain crops at all—and that shrinks global food supply.
“Supply and demand would tell you that if there is less supply entering the market for food commodities, then we’re going to see higher food prices,” Alexander said. “It sort of doesn’t really matter where the shortfall occurs. The price gets transmitted everywhere.”
Alexander explained the pain lands harder in Africa and Asia because people in those regions spend a far higher share of their income on food, and food demand is inelastic.
“When you’re not able to afford a sufficient nutritious diet because it’s become more expensive, then that’s why you end up having those negative consequences in the poorer regions of the world,” he told UnHerd.
North America, Alexander noted, is largely insulated because it is wealthy enough to absorb the price shock without nutritional consequences.
The report’s Iran war impact findings arrive against an otherwise improving backdrop. Its baseline data show global hunger has declined for a third straight year, from 8.6% of the world’s population in 2022 to 7.8% in 2025, or about 645 million people.